Posts Tagged ‘planning’
Advance Preparation
While people in Florida have been preparing in advance for the threat of hurricane Ian, yesterday we took a first step in preparing for cold weather that will be impacting our lives in the weeks and months ahead. We’ve been planning for a while to try something new to see if we could adjust our horses’ attitudes about the inside of the barn. The last time we put them inside the stalls during harsh weather they were none too happy about it. More precisely, downright panicky over it.
The weather yesterday morning served up added inspiration for executing our plan by presenting our first confirmed frost of the season.
Didn’t really see that coming. The air temperature was 37°F up at the house. That much colder down the hill, obviously.
On a perfectly sunny morning, we opened access to the barn to let the horses freely explore on their own initiative while we lingered nearby to provide a calming presence. With the four stalls all open and stocked with food and water, they had a chance to come inside and check out the entire space or step in a stall for a nibble, yet they could also go right back outside whenever they wished.
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There was plenty of apprehension and a few instances of being startled but overall they behaved as well as we hoped and inspired us to continue the exercise many more times in the days ahead. It’s a little akin to having four bulls in a china shop to have them loosely meandering in the cramped space around the stalls. Mix was the only one to figure out there was something to eat in the stalls and grabbed a mouthful of feed before quickly darting back outside to munch. Then she came back in and repeated the routine a couple times.
Any quick movement from one horse triggers all the others to follow suite which is a little nerve wracking when suddenly they all have to make it through a narrow door at once.
They were obviously unsure about what we were up to and wary about the strange access we had granted. We are hoping their uncertainty will diminish with future iterations of the drill. Eventually, we will want to get them used to coming inside during darkness since that is often the situation when we end up bringing them in during stormy or super cold winter weather.
As often as possible in the days ahead, we hope to allow them to come and go as they please inside the barn in hopes of creating and strengthening feelings of comfort with being in the stalls.
Back when we had the Arabian horses our experience was completely different. Those four would line up and beg to be allowed in during nasty weather and seemed thrilled to each have their own protected spaces with unchallenged access to food and water.
I’m not expecting to achieve a change to that level from our rescued Thoroughbreds, but just getting to a point where they don’t show signs of triggered PTSD when we bring them inside during bad weather will be a great relief.
I like being prepared in advance, just in case we experience any bitter storms this winter.
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Fair Bound
Today is the only day that worked out for us to pay a visit to the Minnesota State Fair so we enlisted the services of our animal sitter to cover the hours we plan to be away and we’re going for it. Neither of us can remember how many years it has been since we last went to the fair but it has been a long time.
I’ve only changed my mind about going several times after reading articles about long lines, not just at food booths but also simply getting a seat on a shuttle bus to the fair itself. Cyndie pointed out we already had coverage for the day so we might as well go.
Knowing today would be booked for all-day fun, we made a point of diving into chores as soon as we got home yesterday. We pulled a full shift on the driveway, raking up and shaping gravel shoulders for 60 yards (30 on each side). Then I scooped a few days of manure that had accumulated in the paddocks over the weekend while Cyndie did some weeding around the barn.
While we were at the lake, both our cell phones were buzzing with storm alerts from back home and our power co-op emailed a notice the power had gone out. Upon arriving home we found no evidence whatsoever that we’d lost power. There were a few small tree branches on the ground but not anything that different from a typical windy afternoon. The rain gauges held between 2.5 and 3.0 inches of water.
The images in our minds triggered by the weather app warnings conjured a much more vigorous impact than what physical evidence presented upon our return home. For that we are thankful. Unfortunately, outcomes like this serve to feed my tendency to be nonchalant when it comes to alarming weather alerts.
Sunday night, the Hayward area got pounded hard by a very dramatic 1:30 a.m. thunderstorm. It had Delilah in fits, barking at the flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder. She works hard to scare off thunderstorms due to a deep-seated drive to protect us from harm. All she did is protect us from getting good sleep.
As the storm raged at its peak intensity, I invited Cyndie to imagine what it would be like to experience that from inside a two-person tent. That is what I and a few others endured in June during the Tour of Minnesota bike trip because we opted out of the invitation to sleep inside the school. Throw in the sound of an air-raid siren wailing right overhead for full effect.
No storms in the forecast for today’s fair adventure. Just a threat of sore feet and tested patience in dealing with a hundred-thousand other people trying to do the same thing as us. Oh, and a high potential of exceeding my daily sugar and overall calorie intake goals in a span of very few hours.
We are looking forward to it.
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Daylight Moon
In an all-blue sky the other morning, the faint apparition of the crescent moon stood out as the only disruption.
Late yesterday, I walked the driveway to more accurately measure how much length remains of unfinished asphalt edges. My last estimate of 80 yards was wishful thinking. If we do 40 yards a day, we should have it finished in 3 days of work. That effort will have to wait until next week. Cyndie and I are going to the lake this weekend and taking Delilah with us.
I had always planned to work on finishing the driveway slowly and methodically, so this is not a problem. However, there is no denying that we are both getting eager for the day when we rake the last portion of gravel over the final exposed edge of asphalt out of the roughly 600 yards that needed attention.
It’s a good thing that we love having a long driveway. If we didn’t, all this work would seem to be much more effort than it’s worth.
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Concept Proved
I did a test length of backfilling the sharp drop from the driveway’s gravel shoulder to the grass to soften the slope. We plan to toss some grass seed on that and call it finished.
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I think it is a reasonable improvement. Before we can actually achieve this level of finish, there remains a lot of distance of asphalt edge that is still exposed. I knocked off another 25 yards by myself yesterday. A little progress is better than no progress at all. I’m looking forward to Cyndie’s return tomorrow so we can double-team the job, which effectively doubles the distance we can complete in a day.
Actually, we have made enough progress toward getting the gravel pulled up over all the edges that seeing the shrinking distance that remains is starting to serve as “a carrot” enticing us to keep after it to get ‘er done.
I keep picturing the challenge I will have, come winter when I need to navigate the slopes of those edges to plow snow beyond the width of the pavement. The less steep we can make that slope, the better it will be for me for clearing snow.
Unfortunately, what I envision is that the blade will likely tear up much of the grass we might be able to get growing on those slopes by winter. It will give me extra incentive to be careful about keeping the blade up a few inches on the sides. I can hope that we get some good hard freezes before the first plowable amount of snow falls. That makes all the difference. If the ground isn’t frozen by the time I need to plow the driveway, it’s always a messy exercise.
I wonder if we will get much snow this winter. We didn’t buy the heated driveway option to melt snow off the pavement.
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Not Kidding
I wasn’t kidding around when I described the drama of my getting stung on Tuesday. Whatever it was, there is a chunk of flesh missing from the middle of the large inflamed area on my back.
This is how it looked last night, over 24 hours after the bugger got me:
I should probably have been researching anti-venom or something. On the other hand, maybe it will give me a super power. I mean, a new super power, different than the other ones I already had.
Cyndie suspects it could have been a horsefly bite. I’ve already been bitten on the back by a horse and that didn’t give me any new senses. I’ve never experienced this reaction from a horsefly before and now I’m thinking I don’t ever want to experience it again.
As luck would have it, I can soak my back in the lake for a few days again, starting this afternoon. Due to Cyndie’s good sense to plan well in advance, she locked in multiple weekends with our house/farm sitter throughout the summer that have us up north two weekends in a row this month.
Actually, I will be enjoying three weekends in a row because I plan to join two of Cyndie’s brothers and a bunch of their golfing pals in Hayward the following weekend. I will be biking with anyone who chooses to skip one of the rounds of golf, most likely in the woods on my mountain bike. No battery to save me on that machine.
That would be a good time for the insect bite to give me a super dose of extra stamina and climbing ability. On one hand, I hope the residual effects of the wound are long gone by that time, but on the other hand, I could use all the help I can get when pedaling the off-road bike on the hilly trails in the Chequamegon National Forest.
This weekend we are driving up with Cyndie’s mom and will meet our friends, Mike and Barb Wilkus for a few days of water worship and good eats.
Further progress on the driveway shoulders will have to wait.
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Lotta Landscaping
Enough already with the driveway subject dominating my posts of late. I’m as ready to move on as anyone but there is a lot of work left to get the new driveway to the level of completion we seek. Bear with me for just a few more days. There will be a little break from this topic starting tomorrow. We are leaving this morning for the lake. I get to watch live coverage of the Tour de France for a few days! I can write about how great swimming is in that precious Round Lake water.
When we return home, our plan is to begin cleaning up the edges. It is going to be a big job but we are looking forward to it. Achieving that level of finish will be a very pleasing accomplishment. I know this because I have taken a couple of stabs at what it might involve.
Before:
Old folds of sod from when the original asphalt was dug up need to be picked up. The gravel will be raked up and shaped to cover the exposed edges of the new asphalt.
Here is a section where I did just that:
As we finish them, along the lengths of both sides, I will be visualizing what it will be like when I am trying to plow snow beyond the edge of the asphalt, which needs to happen to maintain a full drive-able width through the full winter season. It will be good to have the gravel base along the edges for that purpose.
A few days of lake life bliss will help us to be fresh and ready to go for a few days of landscaping next week. I’m looking forward to both.
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Departure Imminent
My bag is close to packed and my bike is ready and waiting. Cyndie will drive me to meet Gary Larson and he and I will head for Brainerd after noon.
I will be sleeping on the earth in my tent tonight and every other night for a week. It will be a blast with 200 or so like-minded souls.
We’ll bike to Walker, Park Rapids, Bemidji, and Staples, not exactly in that order. Ultimately, we make our way back to Brainerd next Saturday.
I’m going to try posting a photo a day throughout the week. I’ll soon find out if I get functional cell service in the areas of Minnesota where we will be cavorting.
Bon voyage! Take care of the world while I am off enjoying riding with friends in whatever weather we meet. Something tells me it will be warm and buggy. Black flies, mosquitos, horse flies… Nature’s finest.
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Spontaneous Trip
With only the briefest of forethought, yesterday afternoon I decided to drive up to the lake with the fire-pit benches I built last fall. It was windy and a little wet at home, but I didn’t give much consideration to how different it might be a hundred miles north. I drove right into some serious falling snow that occasionally dropped visibility to nothing but the car in front of me.
In addition to the wild weather, I rolled up to a road closure that offered very poor signage about a detour option. A simple trip to the lake place became an adventure I hadn’t anticipated.
Ultimately, I made it to the intended destination safe and sound, but as I traveled up the gravel entrance toward the house there were branches down everywhere on the ground. Then, limbs. Then, trees! There must have been quite a wind event up here recently.
Between the snow and branches, I decided not to bother immediately placing the benches I brought. They can stay in the garage for now, if I can even get them out of the car. It took me four tries to reverse Jenga® them far enough inside that the hatch could close.
They were built for the fire pit, not to nest inside of each other cleanly. The increasing width of the legs combined with the lower cross supports makes navigating the opening an exercise in advanced geometric problem-solving.
Or, in my case, trial and error.
It worked to get them in there. It’ll work to get ’em out again. No matter how many tries it takes me.
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Counting Bales
The way I view it, managing the inventory of hay bales to feed horses is an imprecise science. Whether guided toward serving sizes by weight or “flakes” from the bale, there is widely varying uniformity of both and an uncertain outcome of which horse will eat it and when they do, how much they will consume. Horses we’ve had all seem content to spill and waste as much as they actually eat.
I was once told that if horses get hungry enough, they will eat whatever is served. Given that ours are recovering from a variety of levels of neglect, we’d rather not put them in that level of desperation. Not sharing the same sense of smell as a horse leaves me wondering when they are ignoring a serving because they don’t like the smell.
Cyndie is much quicker than me to declare a bale as “bad” because it is musty, moldy or smells dusty. That hay gets tossed for some other purpose, usually, landfill somewhere on our property.
All that makes it hard for me to judge if we have enough or how urgently we need to bring more in. Today we are basing it on the space we have for storage. As the stock in our hay shed has dropped to a single layer, we have put in the call for another delivery.
Of course, in order to reduce it to one layer, I needed to move 42 bales into the barn. I also ended up rearranging the scrap lumber stored on the right side of the hay shed to create more space for stacking new bales.
The floor of the hay shed is dirt and we put down pallets under the bottom layer of bales, hoping some air beneath them will reduce mold development. It doesn’t really work. As we ended up doing in the past, we’ve decided to leave the bottom layer of old musty bales in place this time and stack the new incoming bales on top of them.
It’s a treat that we don’t need to do the work of lifting and hauling the hundreds of new bales that will be arriving but it is not lost on me that I will be lifting and stacking them all five-high in the shed.
Yesterday was just a warmup for a much bigger upper body workout to come. Hopefully, these bales will all smell perfect to Cyndie and the horses.
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Empty Coop
It wasn’t long ago that we were renovating the coop in preparation for housing the two groups of chicks at the same time when we moved them out of their respective brooders.
Now the coop stands empty. On Sunday, my brother and his wife stopped by to pick up the three survivors of the massacre that took out 22 chickens.
The ghost predators that have been taking advantage of us for several months will not find one more chicken dinner here this year. Maybe that will provide incentive for them to move on to some other property.
We will take a year off to mull over the possibility of trying again. At this point, it feels like our methods will need to involve something less than free-ranging given the increasing priority of not experiencing any more losses like we’ve endured this year.
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Relative Something 